Principles for Living Your Best Life in The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
The Midnight Library is a thought-provoking novel centered on how to live a deeply satisfying life.
This is not a review. See why. This article contains spoilers.
Context
Nora Seed has given up on life. She’s been fired from a low-paying job she kind of liked, her beloved rescue cat has died, and she doesn’t speak to her brother. She panicked before her wedding and broke up with her fiancé. Further, both her parents have died, and her best friend has moved halfway round the world to Australia.
She decides there’s nothing left for her—and attempts suicide.
But instead of dying, Nora finds herself in a library with a school librarian who had been kind to her when she was young. The librarian explains that she can step into different versions of her life—an infinite variety of paths, each contained inside a book. Nora begins selecting lives by undoing her regrets; for example, a life in which she kept her cat, who’d died outdoors, indoors instead. Slowly, she begins to unpack the tangled web of what she thought her life should be from what it could be, and to discover what it is she really wants.
Key Ideas
Letting go of others’ expectations for you is a prerequisite for happiness
Thriving requires not only avoiding negatives, but pursuing positives
Embracing life’s possibilities means embracing its uncertainties
Letting go of others’ expectations for you is a prerequisite for happiness
Nora comes to realize that many of her regrets revolve around not doing what someone else wanted her to do. Her ex-fiancé had wanted her to run a pub with him, her brother had wanted her to join a band with him, her father had wanted her to become a professional swimmer, and her best friend had wanted her to move to Australia. But she tries each of these paths one by one—and in each one, she’s miserable, even when she’s externally successful. In her rockstar life, the band succeeds; Nora is wealthy and famous. Yet she rarely gets to play the songs she actually wants to play, she had dated a movie star she’d admired in her original life but he turns out to be shallow, and she doesn’t have good relationships with her brother or other bandmates. In her champion-swimmer life, she feels like a fraud, asked to give life advice to a glamorous audience while suffering from clinical depression.
It takes some time for her to unpick everything, but eventually Nora realizes that the problem with those lives was that she was living out others’ goals for her rather than her own. Even when those lives brought her external benefits—whether on a large scale, such as significant wealth and international fame, or a smaller scale, such as owning a cozy pub in the countryside or simply an ocean view from her apartment—she was never fulfilled. By contrast, when she returns to her original life, she reflects that it feels different, among other reasons,
because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfillment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself (284).
Her story is a vivid reminder that if we want to be happy, we can only do that by pursuing and achieving our own values, not by blindly accepting others’.
Thriving requires not only avoiding negatives, but pursuing positives
Nora begins her journey by trying to relieve the burden of the regrets she’s been carrying, many of which result from her accepting others’ expectations. Once she does this, she feels a lot better, but she still doesn’t know which life path to lead. She floats around for a while, sampling all kinds of lives: She tries being a glaciologist, a winemaker, a mother, and many other professions. Many are nice, but none are deeply satisfying—until she asks the librarian to let her try a life in which she accepted a coffee date with a nice doctor who’d shown some interest in her. The life that follows, in which they fall in love and get married and have a kid and Nora works as a professor, is the best Nora has tried. Although she still eventually decides to leave it, that path is the catalyst for her deciding that she actually wants to live—to try to pursue some of the things she’d enjoyed as a philosophy professor and wife of the nice doctor. She realizes that she has found the path that was right for her not by avoiding anything or wandering aimlessly, but by pursuing romance. Easing her regrets is a good start, but it’s not enough for her to truly thrive; she needs to pursue positive values too.
Embracing life’s possibilities means embracing its uncertainties
One thing Nora observes repeatedly is that it’s difficult to predict all the results of her actions. Sometimes it’s because of things she hadn’t noticed before, such as her ex-fiancé’s tendency to belittle her interests. But sometimes her actions have consequences she could never have predicted, such as her choice to pick up her elderly neighbor’s prescriptions for him being the reason he doesn’t need to go into a nursing home. At first, this uncertainty is part of why Nora’s life feels so overwhelming; she feels she’s failed so much and she can’t predict what effect her actions will have, so why keep trying? But eventually Nora realizes that uncertainty is part of life, and that although things can go wrong, there are also so many ways that they can go right. She’ll never know which way it goes if she doesn’t even try.
The Vibe
Because the book is Nora’s journey, how it feels to read is closely tied to where she is on that journey. Early on, I found it unpleasant because of how miserable Nora is. But as she goes through the library, it gets better. This is the second of Haig’s books that I’ve read, and I definitely prefer its simpler style; the name-dropping pretentiousness of How to Stop Time is much less present in this book.
A Caveat
For the most part, I really enjoyed the book because it makes you think about what you really want for your life. What could be more profound than that? However, there was some virtue signalling that irritated me: There were several platitudes about caring about “the environment” without any exploration of what that means or how it fits into Nora’s values. The unthinking acceptance of the idea that “the environment” is intrinsically valuable is sadly common and, because it’s not integrated with Nora’s character development, sticks out as a symbol to other environmentalists that “I’m a good person!” rather than actually developing the novel. To be clear, a character can have all kinds of beliefs, but if they aren’t integrated with the plot or theme, it comes off as a jarring insert, as in this case.
Conclusion
The Midnight Library is a thought-provoking novel that uses a fantasy technique to enable its protagonist to explore her deepest regrets and desires so that she can build a deeply satisfying life, and that is definitely something to celebrate.
I like this review because it teaches. And it validates my life of constantly asking myself if I was doing what I wanted as much as possible. Vicki Masterson